Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America

516 Pages·2002·1.47 MB·English

by  Kent Walker with Mark Schone

SON OF A
GRIFTER

The Twisted Tale of
Sante and Kenny Kimes,
the Most
Notorious Con Artists
in America
A Memoir by the Other Son
KENT WALKER WITH MARK SCHONE
for
Lynn, Kristina, Carson, and Brandy
CONTENTS
1 LIAR 1 
2 THE HINDU AND THE WHORE 17 
3 SANDY AND ED 27 
4 ME AND MOM 45 
5 THE MILLIONAIRE 59 
6 THE AMBASSADOR 65 
7 SHOPPING FOR MAIDS 81 
8 THE HEIR AND THE CREEPS 88 
9 SURFBOARDS 99 
10 CASTING SPELLS 109 
11 ESCAPE 122 
12 YO-YO 132 
13 THE SNITCH 145
14 HIGH ROLLERS  160
15 THREE STRIKES 169 
16 MS. PACMAN 180 
17 PARTIES 186 
18 THE GOOD SOLDIER 199 
19 REVENGE OF THE MAIDS 207 
20 LIFE BEHIND BARS 222 
21 SILLY PUTTY 245 
22 FRENCH FRIES AND RANCH DRESSING 259  
23 ELMER 276
24 ANARCHY 290 
25 BODY DOUBLE 307 
26 KONA 323 

27 SHOW ME THE MONEY 335 
28 CUBA 346 
29 LIKE MOTHER, LIKE SON 352 
30 HOMELESS 365 
31 GUARDIAN ANGEL 378 
32 IRENE 396 
33 JULY 5 403 
34 HOLDING THE BAG 415 
35 BAD VIBRATIONS 421 
36 POISON PEN 432 
37 SHOWDOWN 460 
38 ON ICE 482 
AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PRAISE
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
1

LIAR

I
make my living as a vacuum-cleaner salesman. I’ve met a
lot of good liars in my day. None of them are as good as my
mother.
When people lie, the story goes, some tic gives them
away. They blink or break their gaze or touch their noses
with their fingers. Polygraph machines operate on the princi-
ple that these physical signs are inside the body too, and in-
voluntary. Breathing quickens, heart rates jump, and the
needle on the lie detector skitters over the graph when run-
of-the-mill humans try to deny a criminal truth.
Who can beat a lie detector test? Swamis, maybe, with
pulse and breath control, or con artists, or cold-blooded so-
ciopaths. My mother claims to have relatives among the first
category, and most observers probably think she belongs to
the other two.
I agree that Mom would have no trouble fooling a ma-
chine. I’ve seen her walk into parties filled with little clumps
of people who each know her under a different alias. Instead
of fleeing in panic, she works the room, remembering what
fake name she used with each mark, never slipping, never
breaking a sweat. A few electrodes and straps on her arms
wouldn’t faze her.
But it’s too easy to say her skill stems from the sangfroid
2 Kent Walker
of a grifter. Her gift for lying comes from passionate convic-
tion. She never blinks or stutters in the midst of the most or-
nate fibs, because she believes what she’s saying without
reservation. A good liar always starts with a germ of truth
and builds from there: that’s Mom. She can’t distinguish be-
tween what’s real and what she’s invented, which makes her
preternaturally persuasive.
I can make a more educated guess than anyone on earth
about when she’s lying, though there are no outward symp-
toms. I just know when and why she does it, and about what.
The hard part is reaching backward through decades of fab-
rications and embellishments to find what she started with,
the first hard kernel of reality. Even when I think I’ve found
it, I don’t always trust it.
If you ask me where Sante Kimes came from, then, I can’t
be sure, nor would I swear to anything under oath. All I can
tell you is how the story evolved.
A
t 9 a.m. on Wednesday, July 8, 1998, I pulled my white
Corvette into a parking space and killed the engine. I un-
folded a cardboard sunshade and spread it across the dash-
board, just like all the other morning commuters in Greater
Las Vegas, and then walked to the service entrance of the
low cinderblock building on Decatur Avenue that housed my
business. I’d been out of town over the long holiday week-
end and had a lot of catching up to do.
As soon as I was inside, my sales manager approached
me. I heard Greg chirp “Good morning,” but what struck
me was the pained expression on his face. “Your mom and
your brother have been calling here,” he said. That’s why
he looked uncomfortable. He knew I wouldn’t consider
this good news—I hated having my fifteen employees
know anything about the antics of my estranged mother
and brother. “They’ve been calling nonstop for the last two
days.” There was a backlog of sixty messages, most of
them aborted collect calls—the kind people in jail have to
make.
Already I was embarrassed, but I played it nonchalant. “If